It's after midnight on the sixth year after you inaugeratedthe shattering of my heart, and I'm not thinking about the wayyou held me in the palm of your long-fingered hand nor lookingfor those letters I saved somewhere in a cardboard box,but rather realizing how murdering the memory of you

didn't quite end the sense of your breath in my earnor your stroking of my leg that night before the taxi cameand took you permanently away from me.

You'll never know the way you lived in my cells . . .Nor the way I used to gaze at the stars to feel close to you--same stars, same old moon tonight -- reminding me

how small and alone I am, no one filling my pores with hot, yearning music, no one carrying me where I've never been before nor wanting to jump the fenceinto my yard . . . Oh, this holy life in an expanding universe

where it's after midnight on the eve of a fading dreamof the impossible. I'm learning, at least, to sleep eyes open,although I still sleep naked as if I were immune to the cold . . .

This body eclipsed so long, it's as though the world's turned dark.And now the languid stretch of limbs, wanting the feelof anything . . . even if just feeling my textured, soft skin.